http://www.ccrjustice.org/news…

“Americans from all over the country – more than 37,000 of them – asked that a copy of the Constitution be delivered to the President in their name and cordially requested that he make time in his busy schedule to read it.

“While I was going over the list of who’s been naughty and nice,” Mr. Claus said, as he prepared for his visit to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, “I heard from many people who feel the President hasn’t been doing a very good job of upholding his oath to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ the Constitution.”

Responding to an urgent request from the Center for Constitutional Rights, Claus stepped in to bring messages from Americans who felt the President might need a refresher course in the Constitution. Citizens want to remind President Bush that the Constitution forbids torture and spying on Americans without a warrant, requires that prisoners get a fair hearing of the charges against them before a real court and makes the government’s treaty obligations, such the Geneva Conventions, the law of the land.

“These Constitutions will make great holiday reading,” Claus continued. “I want to be sure that the President has plenty of time to look at them before he decides on his New Year’s resolutions.””

Dubya, hit the books!  

For starters, I must give a hat tip to Brandon Friedman for coming up with that saying as we were going back and forth discussing sayings that we should be using this upcoming year.

But at this time of year, especially on Christmas time – a holiday where religion is now intertwined and nearly synonymous with a front running Presidential candidacy – we should celebrate some deserving yet underappreciated people. These battle tested, wounded and weary warriors whose crusade to engage, battle and fight with those “non-believers” and satan lovers (liberals too, no doubt) who are waging this War on Christmas.

How can we not take a moment to stop and thank those who stand tall and use every weapon at their disposal in order to fight a cataclysmic fight to the death against the godless souls who want to purge the world from celebrating the birth of the one who represents all “true Americans”.

People like Fred Thompson:

COLMES: Senator, you recently got the endorsement of Congressman Steve Young. And you were very happy about that. Steve King, excuse me. You were happy to get that endorsement. He recently initiated HR847, recognizing Christianity as a great faith, expressing support for Christmas. Is this a good use of Congress's time? Do you support that kind of legislation? Is this a good thing for this guy to be doing?

THOMPSON: I don't know anything about that bill. I know Congressman King though, and I would tend to think that anything he would do would be totally appropriate.

COLMES: …Are candidates trying to out-God each other? We keep hearing, you know — Mike Huckabee has been talked about a little while. Some people think there's a cross in his new add, Christian leader in one of the ads. Where do you stand on this issue of candidates trying to out- God each other in this race?

THOMPSON: Well, the candidates are going to have to make up their own minds about what they think is appropriate. There's no question that faith is important to us as a people, and it's important to our country. You know, the Declaration of Independence itself points out that our basic rights come from God and not from government, and that's been our tradition, and always will be.

“Our basic rights come from God and not from government, and that’s been our tradition, and always will be.” In response to a question about whether candidates are trying to “out-God” each other. Bravo, Grandpa Fred. A score of 97 on the unintentional comedy scale. Truly a brave soldier in the War on Christmas.

And to you, John Gibson, a brave Veteran with the excellent use of the battle tested “deny, deny, accuse” attack by (1) promoting himself and Mike Huckabee for predicting that this War would lead to someone like Huckabee making his ad as if he was provoked by the “political correctness pushing Christians out of the public square” and (2) condemning Huckabee for “upping the ante” over Bush in over-the-top messianic Christian crusader that was condemned for the public expression of his faith.

Yes!!! A Medal of Freedom for Mr. Gibson for denying that this is Huckabee’s fault, and that it was something he warned about – AND blaming it on the other side.

And as a highly decorated four star general in this War on Christmas who has been through three prior War’s as well, Bill O’Reilly, (this is a pretty funny article) who just this week went on the offensive with a brutal attack against Great Barrington that has been compared favorably to the “shot heard round the world”.

On this stealth surprise attack in the middle of the night, O’Reilly sent one of his top commanders and launched a devastating attack against the town council:

Watters told the council “You guys are attacking these Christmas lights here” and asked “is this some kind of ruse to de-emphasize Christmas?” Omigod. When a council member replied that “that is not an accurate statement” Watters asked him “what are your feelings regarding the Christmas lights?” He was told they were private feelings and none of his business, then was dressed down further by another member who told him they resented his accusations of attacking Christmas, or Christianity, and said they were asking very reasonable questions in trying to save the environment.

Major Watters is certainly due for a promotion after this bold and daring initiative where he literally put himself at risk and in the direct line of fire.

So with these inspiring stories of the Christmas War Vets, I now realize how proud I should be to have these brave Soldiers of God here to protect me in this long and ongoing War on Christmas – putting themselves at risk and laughing in the face of danger against the Godless souls who are slowly trying to suffocate Christmas out of this great country.

Next thing you know, they’ll be fighting against those who want to make it so the sales, songs, celebrating and decorations can’t start until after Halloween.

This past week, we learned that an administration official in the CIA had destroyed videotapes of the agency’s use of severe interrogation techniques on detainees held in secret, extra-legal prisons. Responsibility for this sad stain of dishonor on America’s integrity rests squarely with the president. The evidence destroyed depicted the president’s policy of snatching terrorist suspects from the streets of foreign countries, hiding them away in secret prisons, and torturing them. The president has created a culture of criminal misconduct and cover up, has injected politics into the administration of justice, and has made public policy a slave to his ideology. I have called for a special counsel to conduct a thorough but unbiased investigation of this matter.

snip

I do not make the call for a special counsel lightly. For 34 years, 16 years as the chairman or ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, I have been a supporter and steward of the Department of Justice. I still maintain the utmost respect and admiration for the career prosecutors who enforce our laws every day without bias. But when a president abandons our cherished national values of upholding the rule of law and respecting human dignity, and when he allows our system of justice to be influenced by partisan politics, the attorney general he appointed cannot preside over an investigation that goes to the heart of the administration’s conduct. In such circumstances, our law requires the appointment of a special counsel.

White House faces hearing on CIA tapes

The Bush administration has made its position clear in legal filings and now gets a chance to say it to a judge in open court: Hold off on inquiring about the destruction of CIA videotapes that showed suspected terrorists being interrogated.

U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy ordered the hearing Friday over the objection of the Justice Department after lawyers raised questions about the possibility that other evidence also might have been destroyed.

Kiriakou in hot water for admitting the US has tortured?

As reported by  RAW STORY (with video), John Kiriakou, who led the squad which captured the suspected terrorist, told ABC’s Brian Ross that although he did not witness the waterboarding himself, fellow agents told him about it and said it broke Abu Zubaydah’s resistance in less than a minute.

Now the CIA has sent a “criminal referral” to the Justice Department to investigate whether Kiriakou disclosed classified information in that interview. However, according to CNN, these referrals rarely lead to criminal charges, and it is not yet clear whether there has been any violation.

Jonathan Turley

 

“I think it’s more than an inference at this point, which is one of the reasons there’s a call for a special prosecutor,” he said. “There are at least six identifiable crimes here, from obstruction of justice to obstruction of Congress, perjury, conspiracy, false statements, and what is often forgotten: the crime of torturing suspects.

   Added Turley, “If that crime was committed it was a crime that would conceivably be ordered by the president himself, only the president can order those types of special treatments or interrogation techniques.”

• obstruction of justice.

• obstruction of Congress.

• perjury.

• conspiracy.

• false statements.

• the crime of torturing suspects.

As long as the Nancy and Harry Collaboration Theatre doesn’t get involved in this, there is a chance that this could actually go somewhere! With WH lawyers involved, this COULD be the scandal (#8,742, iirc) that rips away the Bushco Cloak of Teflon and spurs both the media and the politicians to action. Conyers and Kennedy are on board, despite Jay Rockefellers insistence that there is nothing behind the curtain. If pursued, in my opinion this puts us one more juicy revelation/scandal away from people getting serious about going after Bushco. Despite the Dem leadership trying it’s best not to rock any boats.

Cross your fingers, but don’t hold yer breath.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Thick black smoke billowed from a fire Wednesday in Vice President Dick Cheney’s suite of offices in the historic Eisenhower Executive Office Building next to the White House.

Cheney’s office was damaged by smoke and water from fire hoses, White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said. The vice president was not in the building at the time; he was in the West Wing of the White House with President Bush.

More than 1,000 people who work in the building were evacuated. The fire broke out on the second floor of the building around about 9:15 a.m. and was under control within a half hour, District of Columbia fire department spokesman Alan Etter said.  source

Cheney was in the White House with President George W. Bush receiving their morning intelligence briefings when the blaze erupted and people were evacuated from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building safely, White House officials said.

Thick black smoke billowed from the second floor of the hulking granite structure, which is part of the White House compound and faces the West Wing of the presidential mansion.

Firefighters quickly brought the fire under control. The cause was being investigated.

 Reuters

The incident brings this to mind:

In a tiny government office in Zirndorf, Georg Schleyer takes handfuls of ripped up bits of paper out of a sack and arranges them on his desk.

As more and more scraps emerge from the bag, the jumble of fragments grows bigger and more intriguing. I can make out the code names of secret agents, there are torn-up photos and twisted lengths of microfilm.

These are the files of the Stasi – the former East Germany’s Ministry of State Security. They are secrets the Stasi had tried to destroy, but which are now being pieced back together.

(…)

“Sometimes I get so excited with my work, I miss my lunch break,” Georg says.

“Once I even forgot to go home. What I’m doing is important. I’m helping to bring the history of East Germany back to life. So that former citizens of the GDR will have the chance to find out who spied on them, and why.”

No secret police force in history has ever spied on its own people on a scale like the Stasi.

Some calculations have concluded that in East Germany there was one informer to every seven citizens Back-to-back, the files would have stretched more than 100 miles (161km).

So when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, panic-stricken Stasi officers had mountains of classified files to destroy. Unluckily for then, the shredding machines could not cope with the sheer volume of paper and broke down. So the Stasi resorted to ripping files up by hand.

But the secrets did not die. More than 600 million scraps were recovered, put in sacks and stored. Georg and his team of puzzlers have pieced some back together. But it would take them more than 400 years to finish the job by hand.

Now, though, computers may speed up the solution.

At the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin, scientist Jan Schneider shows me how the new software works. As he feeds Stasi scraps into a scanner, the pieces appear on a giant monitor ready to be sorted and matched.

“It’s like a grand jigsaw puzzle,” Jan explains.

 

“Just like in a jigsaw, where you sort the pieces into sky, trees and so on, so here too in the computer you sort the snippets – according to their background colour, the colour of the writing, whether they’re typewritten or handwritten. After that the search space is small enough to puzzle.”

Then Jan presses a button and, almost magically, the different fragments dance around the screen before joining together into a single document.

There are more than 16,000 sacks of Stasi scraps to get through.

Experts believe that hidden inside are some of the Stasi’s darkest secrets – untold stories of spies and informers, of undercover operations in the West and repression at home. It is thought that computers could process the entire contents within five years.

Repressive memories

In her living room, former dissident Ursula Poppe shows me some of her Stasi files, which have already been pieced back together.

She has discovered that more than 80 people had been spying on her in the GDR. Now Ursula wants all the Stasi files repaired – to remind Germans how repressive the East German regime was.

“More and more people feel nostalgic because many of them feel the time now is not better than the time in the past,” Ursula tells me.

“They forget the bad situations, the repression and the gap of freedom. So I think it’s very important to get a realistic view of the GDR past.”

The Stasi had torn that past into shreds. But with computers handling the pieces, the biggest and most sinister jigsaw puzzle in history may soon be completed. BBC, May 25, 2007

And this:

BERLIN — THROUGHOUT the 1980’s, Sascha Anderson, a poet, musician and literary impresario, was one of the leading voices to speak out against the East German government and its dreaded secret police, the Stasi.

But his credibility gradually evaporated after the Communist government’s collapse as rumors about him acquired the weight of proof: he had been informing on his dissident compatriots all along.

He had been told that his Stasi file had been destroyed. In fact, it was manually reconstructed from some of the millions of shreds of paper that panicked Stasi officials threw into garbage bags during the regime’s final days in the fall of 1989.

Now, if all goes as planned by the German government, the remaining contents of those 16,000 bags will also be reconstructed.

Advanced scanning technology makes it possible to reconstruct documents previously thought safe from prying eyes, sometimes even pages that have been ripped into confetti-size pieces. And although a great deal of sensitive information is stored digitally these days, recent corporate scandals have shown that the paper shredder is still very much in use.

“People perceive it as an almost perfect device,” said Jack Brassil, a researcher for Hewlett-Packard who has worked on making shredded documents traceable. If people put a document through a shredder, “they assume that it’s fundamentally unrecoverable,” he said. “And that’s clearly not true.”

(…)

Modern image-processing technology has made the rebuilding job a lot easier. A Houston-based company, ChurchStreet Technology, already offers a reconstruction service for documents that have been conventionally strip-shredded into thin segments. The company’s founder, Cody Ford, says that reports of document shredding in recent corporate scandals alerted him to a gap in the market. “Within three months of the Enron collapse at end of 2001, we had a service out to electronically reconstruct strip shreds,” he said.  source

Hmmm… guess word got around?

meanwhile back in the US

back in the US,

back in the USSA

East Germany’s Ministry for State Security, known as the Stasi, featured probably the most comprehensive internal security operation of the Cold War. The Stasi built an astonishingly widespread network of informants — researchers estimate that out of a population of 16 million, 400,000 people actively cooperated. The Stasi kept files on up to 6 million East German citizens — one-third of the entire population.

The Stasi operated with broad power and remarkable attention to detail. All phone calls from the West were monitored, as was all mail. Similar surveillance was routine domestically. Every factory, social club and youth association was infiltrated; many East Germans were persuaded or blackmailed into informing on their own families.

The Stasi kept close tabs on all potential subversives. Stasi agents collected scent samples from people by wiping bits of cloth on objects they had touched. These samples were stored in airtight glass containers and special dogs were trained to track down the person’s scent. The agency was authorized to conduct secret smear campaigns against anyone it judged to be a threat; this might include sending anonymous letters and making anonymous phone calls to blackmail the targeted person. Torture was an accepted method of getting information.   source

The Stasi not only tapped every telephone call going into and out of the West Berlin office of the federal OPC, it could access personal details of every single West Berlin resident by using a secret code to penetrate the city’s official computers.   source

a little internet nostalgia here…

The East German Ministry for State Security, known as Stasi, worked closely with the KGB. Like the KGB it was responsible for both internal repression and espionage abroad. Naturally Stasi played an important role in the disinformation campaign. With German efficiency, Stasi explained in a 1969 report how it conducted disinformation:

Periodicals will address specific persons and groups.  One can select actual events, problems etc. using a mixture of truths, half truths, fiction and other well conceived interpretations, so the recipient finds them believable, thus causing the anticipated success. Exact knowledge of conditions within the particular government in the operational area is imperative. Absolutely necessary is thorough knowledge of western language use, as well as psychological, sensitive tactics in approach.

Stasi also explained how it responded to those who exposed human rights violations in the communist empire. It considered the truth about communism “harassment” and said in its report, “Through distribution of aggressively directed messages, the enemy will be disinformed and forced to abandon his harassment campaign thus keeping him disturbed and pointlessly occupied.”    source

Naw, no conspiracies anymore… the world got over that.  Right.